Mustafa has shared a new song, “Gaza Is Calling,” with net proceeds benefitting the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Watch the video, directed by the filmmaker and Succession actor Hiam Abbas, below.
Mustafa, who is Sudanese Canadian, wrote “Gaza Is Calling” in 2020 but chose to release it as a benefit single in light of Israel’s latest assaults on Palestine. Palestinian American model Bella Hadid and Gazan rapper MC Abdul feature in the video, which includes footage shot in Jenin last month.
Mustafa said in a press release:
Gaza is Calling is about my first experience with heartbreak in friendship. I was 11 when I met
this boy from Gaza. We were inseparable. With him I shared one of the deepest loves I’ve ever
known, he grew up alongside me in a housing project in Toronto. And not even this love was a
match for the violence we were up against; the one in our new home, the one that followed him
from Gaza like a cold wind. In the end it was all the bloodshed between us that didn’t allow us to
see each other without tears appearing, and one of the last notes he sent to me was about how
we would continue on in another life.
The string sample is the Arabian nostalgia that we share, the autotuned Arabic I sing is the balance we tried to reach being boys of cultural empires in a small hood, and the Oud is the instrument of our homelands, Sudan and Palestine.
Speaking about the video, Mustafa added:
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